fishing rarotongaThe ultimate fishing holiday!

The big bull mahi-mahi nailed our flying fish dead-bait – and all hell broke loose. Junior sprinted to clear the gear. Tom held the boat steady in the four metre swell. Cade, my partner’s 14-year-old son, grabbed the rod.I’ve seen a few angry mahi-mahi in my life but this one was obviously having a particularly shitty week. Swallowing our hook must have been the last straw. For the next 20 minutes on the end of Cade’s line it completely lost the plot. You’d have thought we’d just cut it off on the Auckland Motorway! Even when Cade had it at the back of the boat and it was obvious to everyone its rampage was over, it refused to come in quietly. Five foot long with a head that would have made a great minivan bumper, it flew out of the swell and landed in the boat, scattering the crew and skipper and almost giving me a Liverpool kiss! ​

They say game fishing is 99 percent boredom and one percent chaos … but in Rarotonga it’s pretty much 100 percent chaos!Arriving on the tail end of a cyclone, Cade and I could only dream of fishing for the first two days of our eight-day family holiday. The weather was so bad commercial fishing boats had been circling outside Avatiu harbour waiting for an opportunity to come in for more than a week. Other boats had been winched from their moorings by crane and now lined the roadside. But that’s the great thing about Rarotonga: when you’re not fishing there’s still plenty of relaxing and sightseeing to do. Cade and I spent a great couple of days investigating the island with his mum (my partner, Jodie) and sister Taila. If I told you we went down to the wharf and fed wahoo and mahi-mahi frames to 90kg giant trevally, that hoovered them up like a bunch of teenagers eating pizza, you probably wouldn’t believe me. I wouldn’t either if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. It was like being in one of those movies where the hero gets shipwrecked on a supposedly deserted island only to discover it’s inhabited by spiders the size of antelopes and even bigger man-eating rats with x-ray vision and teeth like wheat scythes. Anyway, on the evening of the second day the swell dropped to a lazy four and a half metres and we got the call from Junior of Marlin Queen Charters.“Meet us at the wharf tomorrow at 5am,” he said.Four and a half metres! If Cade had been an average 14-year-old I wouldn’t have contemplated taking him out in conditions like that but he’s far from an average teenager. Spending almost every weekend on his grandad’s launch, he holds a number of fishing club records and is as at home on a boat as most kids his age are in front of a Playstation. Which was just as well, because less than twenty minutes after leaving the harbour on our charter boat, a 20 foot Stabicraft named Bobby Marie, we had five screaming reels to deal with! It was like looking after quintuplets: which one do you sort out first? In the end I just grabbed the closest, braced myself on the pitching deck, and started winding (which is probably pretty much what mums and dads of quintuplets do, anyway!).We’d been hit by a pack of wahoo which, I quickly discovered, are the space shuttles of the fish world. Launching themselves into the underwater stratosphere at about a million miles an hour they’re unstoppable - for the first few minutes, anyway. After that they run out of rocket fuel and you can wind them in like puppies on a lead. Puppies with a set of razor sharp teeth Edward Scissorhands would have been proud of, but puppies all the same. By 5.30am we had three 10-12kg specimens in the bin. Not a bad start to the day!Cade’s angry mahi-mahi crossed our path next - a 23kg specimen that probably would have been a New Zealand junior record had he caught it back home. Then we found ourselves in a school of giant skipjack. Averaging 10 to 12kg, they were horses! We lassoed five of them, much to the crew’s delight. In New Zealand we’ve been indoctrinated into thinking skippies (or bonito) are only good for bait, but they’re actually beautiful to eat, particularly as sashimi, and the crew couldn’t resist sampling a few slices while filleting on the way home. We were still marveling at the size of our skippies when our lures were smashed by yellow fin, which are so prolific over there they’re like bait fish. We caught nine of them that morning, averaging about 10kg. The next day we saw the locals hauling in 60kg specimens on 100m droppers with bait. One elderly gentleman caught three that size - not a bad morning’s work considering they were fetching $15 a kilogram on the local market.Most boats in Raro troll Halco laser lures, which I haven’t seen anyone do for a while in New Zealand. Dead baits are also popular, especially flying fish which are supplied by locals who go fishing for them in wooden boats at night – wearing motorcycle helmets so they don’t get knocked out by, well, flying fish! If you’ve been fantasizing about a place where the fishing is insane; where you get so many hits you can’t take your eyes off your gear; where you can’t go to the toilet without coming back to find it’s all on; where yellow-fin tuna are as thick as baitfish, skippies are the size of horses, and it’s marlin season all year round, stop dreaming! Get on a plane to Rarotonga!Needless to say, I’ll be going back as soon as I can.

Where to Fish

Marlin Queen Charters is a very well-run operation, with a mix of NZ, Tongan and local skippers. They work really hard at getting their clients into good fish, and you feel like one of the crew when you fish with them. And as an aside: all the fish we caught were filleted and taken to the Bite Time Café, which makes mahi mahi burgers to die for!

Where to Stay

When we weren’t fishing, we had full use of the Manuia Beach Resort facilities, which were outstanding in every way. The units are absolutely beautiful, with a separate outdoor ensuite making for a truly tropical experience. Infinity pool, safe swimming, great hospitality, food to die for, and accommodating staff with big smiles, make for a memorable stay.Our hosts couldn’t do enough for us….snorkeling gear and reef shoes for five? No sweat! Safe and spectacularly beautiful snorkeling is right on your doorstep at Manuia, with the lagoon hosting wicked tropical fish, and some blue trevally as a bonus.On ‘Island Night’ blue marlin, steak, and chicken, along with delicious salads and fruits, were washed down with a few cocktails to the accompaniment of funky island style music … ahhh, good times!

Where to Eat

There’s no way you’ll go hungry in Rarotonga. If you’re after fine dining, the service and cuisine at Tamarind House is as good as you’ll find anywhere in the world. The food is outstanding, the ambience is unparalleled (large flat lawn, lanterns, overlooking lagoon) and you’re treated like royalty.

If you’re keen to cook your own food, be aware that meat is very expensive to buy on the island, although you can take your own; just remember to declare it. We had access to cooking facilities so invited some of the locals to share a slab of sirloin on the barbecue with us. In the style of the locals our guests turned up at Raro time, (3 hours late) had invited half of their extended family and brought what they described as ‘enough salad and tuna to feed 4 Tongans’. And although having a barbecue is pretty normal for us in NZ, I have to say the Rarotongan menu of seared tuna and mahi-mahi with sashimi on the side beats the hell out of blackened bangers!